A blog looking at the world from a somewhat scientific and technological perspective.

Sunday, July 24, 2016

Let IR RIP

The Institutional Repository (IR) is
obsolete. Its flawed foundation cannot be repaired. The IR must be
phased out and replaced with viable alternatives.

Lack of enthusiasm. The number of
IRs has grown because of a few motivated faculty and administrators. After twenty years of
promoting IRs, there is no grassroots support. Scholars submit papers to an IR because they
have to, not because they want to. Too few IR users become recruiters. There is no network effect.

Local management. At most
institutions, the IR is created to support an Open Access (OA)
mandate. As part of the necessary approval and consensus-building
processes, various administrative and faculty committees impose local
rules and exemptions. After launch, the IR is managed by an academic
library accountable only to current faculty. Local concerns dominate those of the worldwide community of potential users.

Poor usability. Access-, copy-,
reuse, and data-mining rights are overly restrictive or left
unstated. Content consists of a mishmash of
formats. The resulting federation of IRs is useless
for serious research. Even the most basic queries cannot be
implemented reliably. National
IRs (like PubMed) and disciplinary repositories (like ArXiv) eliminate local idiosyncrasies and are far more useful. IRs were supposed to duplicate their success, while spreading the financial burden and immunizing the system against adverse political decisions. The sacrifice in usability is too high a price to pay.

Low use. Digital information improves with use. Unused, it remains stuck in obsolete formats. After extended
non-use, recovering information requires a digital version of
archaeology. Every user of a digital archive participates in its crowd-sourced quality control. Every access is an opportunity to discover, report,
and repair problems. To succeed at its archival mission, a digital archive must be an essential research tool that all scholars need every day.

High cost. Once upon a time, the
IR was a cheap experiment. Today's professionally managed IR costs
far too much for its limited functionality.

Fragmented control. Over the course of
their careers, most scholars are affiliated with several
institutions. It is unreasonable to distribute a scholar's
work according to where it was produced. At best, it is
inconvenient to maintain multiple accounts. At worst, it creates
long-term chaos to comply with different and conflicting policies of
institutions with which one is no longer affiliated. In a
cloud-computing world, scholars should manage their own personal
repositories, and archives should manage the repositories of scholars no longer willing or able.

Social interaction. Research
is a social endeavor. [Creating Knowledge] Let us be inspired by the titans of the
network effect: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.
Encourage scholars to build their personal repository in a
social-network context. Disciplinary repositories like ArXiv and SSRN
can expand their social-network services. Social networks
like Academia.edu, Mendeley, Zotero, and Figshare have the capability
to implement and/or expand IR-like services.

Many academics are suspicious of any commercial
interests in scholarly communication. Blaming publishers for the scholarly-journal crisis, they conveniently forget their own contribution to the dysfunction. Willing academics, with enthusiastic help from publishers, launch ever more journals.[Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke] They also pressure libraries to site license "their" journals, giving publishers a strong negotiation position. Without library-paid site licenses, academics would have flocked to alternative publishing models, and publishers would have embraced alternative subscription plans like an iTunes for scholarly papers. [Where the Puck won't be][What if Libraries were the Problem?] Universities and/or governments must change how they fund scholarly communication to eliminate the marketplace distortions that preserve the status quo, protect publishers, and stifle innovation. In a truly open market of individual subscriptions, start-up ventures would thrive.

I was convinced IRs would disrupt
scholarly communication. I was wrong. All High Energy
Physics (HEP) papers are available in ArXiv. Being a disciplinary repository, ArXiv functions like an idealized version of a federation of IRs. It changed scholarly communication for
the better by speeding up dissemination and improving social
interaction, but it did not disrupt. On the contrary, HEP scholars organized what amounted to an an authoritarian take-over of the HEP scholarly-journal marketplace. While ensuring open access of all HEP research, this take-over also cemented the status quo for the foreseeable future. [A Physics Experiment]

The IR is not equivalent with Green Open Access. The IR is only one
possible implementation of Green OA. With the IR at a dead end, Green OA must pivot towards alternatives that have viable paths
forward: personal repositories, disciplinary repositories, social
networks, and innovative combinations of all three.

About Me

Eric is a technology consultant specializing in the strategic application of new technologies in academic computing and library services.

Prior to this, Eric was the Director of Library Information Technology, a Senior Research Associate and Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. Eric holds a computer science degree from the K. U. Leuven (Belgium) and a Ph. D. in Mathematics from the Courant Institute, New York University, NY. He is the author of papers in scientific computing, library technology, and the graduate textbook "Concurrent Scientific Computing", published by Springer-Verlag.

He chaired the OpenURL standardization committee, which developed the OpenURL ANSI standard. He is on the Board of Directors of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD).